faust in late capitalism

The area next to London's City Airport called Silvertown or North Woolwich is an area of the former docklands which is waiting for regeneration since the early 80s. Again and again it is marketed by the LDA as London’s biggest development opportunity. Vast areas previously occupied by dire docks and dirty large scale industrial plants are fenced off and home to shrubs.

Thousands of new apartments and a colossal aquarium on an anyway derelict site with a view offices and shops, as a regeneration project, that sounds all too marvellous to me to be true. Not only because it reminds me of Dubai's gigantism. From Goethe’s Faust we learned, there is always the old couple. Well, where is it, if there is no one left to get rid off/decant or nothing to dynamite? In this case, it won’t be science killing humanity. The proposals put forward (some of them got planning permission already) show no relation to their surrounding. No wonder they don't because when the whole strategy for the docklands was set up under the Thatcher administration no one looked into the existing spaces of the royal docks. According to their neoliberal doctrines they got rid of everything old, especially the state controlled port because the market will do the job most efficiently if it's not disturbed. But the market acts to different rules than space. Lefebvres bible was published roughly at the same time when London Dockland Development Council was conceiving their strategy. Whereas space “subsumes things produced, and encompasses their relative interrelationships in their coexistence and simultaneity...” - hence it is something incredible complex and hard to define, investment needs security in terms of definition. Space includes the individual and is subjective, pretty hard things to control. Investment can't do without control. In terms of planning, in Silvertown there is no control, no defined perimeter, just 'wild west' do whatever you want. Naturally the proposed developments create their own controlled patches. They are all oriented inwards trying to minimise contact with the undefined context. Secured by design policies and gated communities finalise the scenarios: complete exclusion. It is the local community with is specific needs that is deprived of a real opportunity for overcoming the problems of the second industrial revolution. It's neoliberal thinking and capitalism killing humanity.